NP - Dogon & the Sirius Mystery

[David Morris]

Sounds like something Pynchon might be interested in...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91J44f47WsI

http://custodialsmackdown.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/the-fish-people-are-alive-and-among-us/

The Dogons have a complex history, but a large part of their oral
tradition includes stories about how a race of fish-like beings came
down in a spaceship and imparted various forms of knowledge to them.

They refer to this in their mythology sometimes as a single being
called “Nommo” and sometimes as a group of beings called “the Nommo.”
Dogons frequently describe the Nommo as having the upper body of a man
and the lower body of a snake. And sometimes the Nommo is said to have
a ram’s head with a serpent body.

There are several different religious groups within the Dogon society.
One of them honors a god called Lebe.

The cult of Lebe, the Earth God, is primarily concerned with the
agricultural cycle and its chief priest is called a Hogon. All Dogon
villages have a Lebe shrine whose altars have bits of earth
incorporated into them to encourage the continued fertility of the
land. According to Dogon beliefs, the god Lebe visits the hogons every
night in the form of a serpent and licks their skins in order to
purify them and infuse them with life force. The hogons are
responsible for guarding the purity of the soil and therefore
officiate at many agricultural ceremonies.

One of the things the Dogons learned from the Nommo was a lot of
highly specific information about the star Sirius. Supposedly the
Nommo came from that area of the galaxy and they told them that Sirius
wasn’t just one star. It had a companion star that was a white dwarf.
And there was another companion star that was a small red dwarf star.

Western astronomers first began to suspect that Sirius had a companion
after they observed that the star had a certain “wobble.” But Sirius B
wasn’t discovered until 1862, and we didn’t know it was a white dwarf
star until the 1920’s. Much later on, in 1995, French Astronomers
Daniel Benest and J.L. Duvent announced that they had discovered a
second companion star -  a small red dwarf star now called Sirius C.

So the Dogons were getting accurate astronomical information about
Sirius from the Nommo